5 Questions: IRS chief meets Congress over computer crash

The disappearance of IRS employee emails has kicked the rumor mill over agency targeting of tea party groups into high gear.

Republicans accuse the IRS of disposing of evidence that could link the practice to the Obama Administration and ex-IRS official Lois Lerner. Some Democrats, meanwhile, want to ignore the matter, arguing that tech accidents happen and that the emails aren’t relevant anyway.

President Barack Obama brought in Koskinen to clean up the mess, after firing the acting IRS chief at the time, Steve Miller. Lerner’s admission that the agency had inappropriately used key words like “tea party” to scrutinize applicants for nonprofit status in May 2013, following by a critical inspector general report days later, set off furor.

Here are some to expect:

1. Why just now tell Congress?

Lawmakers want to know why the IRS just told Congress late last week that Lerner’s 2011 hard drive crash resulted in her archived emails being lost.

After all, it’s been more than a year since the IRS controversy came to light and lawmakers started demanding copies of IRS employee emails, with Lerner, who headed tax-exempt unit, being one of Republicans’ key targets from the start.

It is unclear when exactly Koskinen learned of the matter. Koskinen said Monday he first heard of it “late in the spring.” Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) has said that some IRS employees knew as early as February.

Republicans are furious that Koskinen didn’t mention the crash during spring hearings, when they peppered him with questions about why the agency had not turned over all of Lerner’s emails. Koskinen at a late March hearing, for example, retorted that the process is tricky and could take years because of taxpayer privacy laws. He said the agency would comply to turn over all Lerner’s emails but never mentioned that a chunk of them was lost.

Some Republicans are already accusing the IRS of deceit.

“Why did they deceitfully mislead this Congress in promising to provide all of Lerner’s email when they … had already been told about this supposed computer loss?” asked Ways and Means Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) .

But the IRS says it did not realize what happened to Lerner’s emails until it expanded its probe of her files from “relevant” correspondence to all correspondence, as demanded by Republicans.

Koskinen also told reporters on the Hill on Monday he chose now because the Senate Finance Committee was getting close to finalizing its IRS investigation: “We did not expect that. We were expecting that we would complete the Lois Lerner email production by the end of this month, complete with a full discussion of what we’ve been able to find and what we have not.”

2. When was her hard drive recycled, and did they try to get it back?

Some lawmakers and observers had hoped the crashed hard drives could be recovered by top tech experts. But POLITICO reported Wednesday night that the hard drive has been recycled — making retrieval likely impossible, sources say.

The questioning will now likely focus on what steps the IRS took, both when the computers crashed back in 2011, and what the IRS did this year after it discovered the emails were gone.

“There are many pressing questions that must be answered regarding how this development came about and what led to the destruction of the hard drive in the first place,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah.) said in a statement.

The IRS has said the best people in the criminal division — tech experts who can rebuild and search hidden criminal records on computers — weren’t able to recover Lerner’s documents. The IRS also released emails showing Lerner asking for computer help to recover the documents.

Some Republicans, like Oversight Rep. Trey Gowdy (S.C.), want to know if the metadata exist to get the senders, receivers and dates of emails, if not the content.

GOP panel staff members wonder if the IRS went back to the sixth-month files it kept at the time on all employee email to restore Lerner’s Outlook after it crashed. The IRS backed up emails for six months on a disk. That means, theoretically, the IRS should have had a tape at the time of the crash of emails Lerner had received during the first half of 2011, they say.

Oversight Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah) thinks there might be another way to recover the info: “Bring the nerds in! … I want a group of nerds who can tell you how this works, because in this day and age, emails don’t just disappear off the face of the planet. … You can’t just erase the Internet.”